Announcing New Lessons on Working Across Cultures

As many workplaces and businesses have grown increasingly international, the need for working effectively across cultures has grown in tandem. For a long time, people dealt with any potential cultural differences through the cultural competence model: learn the rules of the culture you’re working with, follow them, and you’ll be fine.

But modern employees are more complex than their cultures, interactions are more nuanced, and you don’t always know in advance who you’ll be meeting with or what will help them feel comfortable. We need a new model for working effectively with all sorts of different people. We need to move from Cultural Competence to Cultural Intelligence.

Cultural intelligence, or CQ, is a model for interacting with anyone in a way that is responsive to and respectful of differences. It allows you to stay authentic to your core self, while flexing to accommodate different communication styles, decision-making practices, language barriers, and any other areas of difference.